Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to health information and, more particularly to displaying and editing health information using mobile client devices.
Background of the Invention
Healthcare providers, insurers, pharmacies, and other organizations have a variety of facilities to enable them to obtain, view, and maintain medical records and other health information. With the advent of computers, relational database management systems (RDBMSs), the Internet, and wireless communication devices, information that was once stored in physical files in paper form or in central database servers only available to organizations that “owned” or maintained the data can now be made available to patients and authenticated third parties via a variety of client computing devices, such as, but not limited to mobile client devices.
Despite the ability of providers and patients to view portions of a patients medical information from a computer having an Internet connection, users of mobile devices often find they need medical information when a wireless Internet connection is unavailable. Whether at a provider's office or facility such as a hospital, clinic, lab, or pharmacy, patients currently depend on another entity to access their medical information.
Mobile devices are in common usage, many featuring powerful processors, larger and more colorful displays, and wireless networking capabilities. Despite these advances in mobile technology, as compared to desktop and laptop computers, mobile devices typically have greater limitations on memory capacity, data storage capacity, central processing unit (CPU) capabilities, and networkability. Given the versatility of mobile devices, it is desirable to implement means by which these mobile devices can interact with servers to maintain and display account data in the context of potentially intermittent, unreliable, occasionally-connected, or temporarily-unavailable networking capabilities.
Advancement in mobile devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), smart phones, hand held computers, palmtop computers, ultra-mobile personal computers (PCs), devices operating according to the MICROSOFT™ Pocket PC specification with the MICROSOFT™ WINDOWS™ CE operating system (OS), devices running the ANDROID™ OS, devices running the Symbian OS, devices running the PALM™ OS, devices running the webOS by HEWLETT PACKARD, INC. of Palo Alto, Calif. devices running the Apple IPHONE™ OS by APPLE COMPUTER, INC. of Cupertino, Calif., mobile phones, BLACKBERRY™ devices by RESEARCH IN MOTION of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and devices capable of running mobile browsers such as INTERNET EXPLORER™ (IE) Mobile have made mobile Internet connections possible without laptop, notebook, netbook or tablet computers. However, the limited screen size and computing power of these devices also limits the capabilities of the Internet browsers installed on these devices. As a result, these devices are often unable to display complicated web content and unable to comply with the rigorous Internet security measures employed by medical-related websites, such as health insurance and healthcare provider websites.
Internet browsers such as IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari can save the information they download so that a web page can be viewed later without an active Internet connection. Internet browsers for mobile and non-mobile platforms can save and synchronize Internet web pages. However, current web browsers are not typically configured to selectively store certain information nor do they have the ability to protect sensitive health information that would be necessarily stored in saving the contents of the web page. As a result, most web browsers simply store copies of viewed web pages for a certain amount of time. To avoid congesting a computer with cached data, web browsers often set a limit on how much data will be saved. Using a web browser's cache may provide offline content in certain circumstances, but not in others. When a web page to be saved features dynamic or scripted information, an Internet browser will only save the last viewed screen. For example, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address for the website for accessing a web-based email client such as GOOGLE™ GMAIL™ is typically static. However, the information displayed on the web page changes dynamically as email is added and deleted from the inbox of the email account. As a result, relying on an Internet's browser cache to view health information accessed or edited two weeks ago is ineffective.
An additional shortcoming of the browser-cache model for viewing health information is that web controls cannot be used to vary the display or content of the page. For example, if a user of an insurance website wants to view all the claims that have been processed in a given time period such as the past month or year, a user could use the insurer's website to download this information, provided the user has an active Internet connection. Without an active Internet connection, the user could view any cached pages on his computer, but these pages will not provide this particular set of information in cases where the medical information (i.e., processed claims) has changed since the pages were cached. Additionally, most current web browsers do not store, in cache, pages that have been encrypted. This step is taken to prevent other users and programs from browsing through a user's web cache for sensitive, private health information. Additionally, personal health information is often encrypted or otherwise secured in order to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (P.L.104-191). However, current mobile data delivery techniques cannot display editable personal health information in a HIPAA-compliant manner without resulting in degraded response times, which can result in connections that timeout and/or are terminated before medical data requests from a mobile device can be fulfilled.
Accordingly, what is desired is a means of securely providing medical information to registered patients and providers via mobile devices. What is further desired are methods, systems, and devices for accessing and viewing medical information on mobile devices.
What is needed are mobile client devices configured to reduce inefficient, redundant medical data entry and to facilitate secure transmission and retrieval of medical data. What is further needed are mobile client devices configured to reduce error rates in medical data entry and improve work flow for processing medical data, thereby saving time and expense.